La bandera en la cumbre : Una historia política del montañismo

Sherpas on strike. Feminists planting the suffragette flag atop a peak. Vegan climbers, blind climbers, reluctant climbers in the *maquis* mountains, trans climbers waving the pink, white, and blue banner on each of the Seven Summits, evangelical mountaineers searching for Noah’s Ark on the summit of Ararat. Anarchists heading to the mountains to practice Esperanto or to find hiding spots for direct-action weapons. Fascist, pacifist, Peronist, liberal, and conservative mountaineers. Popes and saintly climbers, Orthodox Jews studying the Torah on the slopes of Everest. The excursions of Tolkien, Lenin, and Helmut Kohl; the mountaintop dreamed of by Martin Luther King. Long queues on 21st-century Everest to wave two dozen assorted flags. "There is no such thing as non-politics; everything is politics," two characters in Thomas Mann’s *The Magic Mountain* tell each other at a Swiss Alpine resort; that literary reference opens this book about the myriad ways politics has been played out from the jagged pulpits of the world’s peaks. Along the way, the book reveals both the grandeur and the squalor of mountaineering history—a realm of freedom and emancipation at times, yet one of oppression on so many other occasions.